Tag Archives: multimeters

Elecronics engineer, entrepreneur, and author Jack Ganssle recently sent us information about his Finksburg, MD, workspace:

I’m in a very rural area and I value the quietness and the view out of the window over my desk. However, there are more farmers than engineers here so there’s not much of a high-tech community! I work out of the house and share an office with my wife, who handles all of my travel and administrative matters. My corner is both lab space and desk. Some of the equipment changes fairly rapidly as vendors send in gear for reviews and evaluation.

Ganssle’s desk is home to ever-changing equipment. His Agilent Technologies MSO-X-3054A mixed-signal oscilloscope is a mainstay.

The centerpiece, though, is my Agilent Technologies MSO-X-3054A mixed-signal oscilloscope. It’s 500 MHz, 4 GSps, and includes four analog channels and 16 digital channels, as well as a waveform generator and protocol analyzer. I capture a lot of oscilloscope traces for articles and talks, and the USB interface sure makes that easy. That’s pretty common on oscilloscopes, now, but being an old-timer I remember struggling with a Polaroid scope camera.

The oscilloscope’s waveform generator has somewhat slow (20-ns) rise time when making pulses, so the little circuit attached to it sharpens this to 700 ps, which is much more useful for my work. The photo shows a Siglent SDS1102CML oscilloscope on the bench that I’m currently evaluating. It’s amazing how much capability gets packed into these inexpensive instruments.

The place is actually packed with oscilloscopes and logic analyzers, but most are tucked away. I don’t know how many of those little USB oscilloscope/logic analyzers vendors have sent for reviews. I’m partial to bench instruments, but do like the fact that the USB instruments are typically quite cheap. Most have so-so analog performance but the digital sampling is generally great.

Only barely visible in the picture, under the bench there’s an oscilloscope from 1946 with a 2” CRT I got on eBay just for fun. It’s a piece of garbage with a very nonlinear timebase, but a lot of fun. The beam is aimed by moving a magnet around! Including the CRT there are only four tubes. Can you imagine making anything with just four transistors today?

The big signal generator is a Hewlett-Packward 8640B, one of the finest ever made with astonishing spectral purity and a 0.5-dB amplitude flatness across 0.5 MHz to 1 GHz. A couple of digital multimeters and a pair of power supplies are visible as well. The KORAD supply has a USB connection and a serviceable, if klunky, PC application that drives it. Sometimes an experiment needs a slowly changing voltage, which the KORAD manages pretty well.

They’re mostly packed away, but I have a ton of evaluation kits and development boards. A Xilinx MicroZed is shown on the bench. It’s is a very cool board that has a pair of Cortex-A9s plus FPGA fabric in a single chip.

I use IDEs and debuggers from, well, everyone: Microchip Technology, IAR Systems, Keil, Segger, you name it. These run on a variety of processors but, along with so many others, more and more I’m using Cortex-M series parts.

My usual lab work is either evaluating boards, products and instruments, or running experiments that turn into articles. It pains me to see so much engineering is done via superstition today. For example, people pick switch contact debounce times based on hearsay or smoke signals or something. Engineers need data, so I tested about 50 pairs of switches to determine what real bounce characteristics are. The results are on my website. Ditto for watchdog timers and other important issues embedded people deal with.